Obsession
by agrajagthetesty
Summary: Is it possible to love when your existence centres around death?


_WARNINGS: Spoilers for up to chapter 35/ episode 16, and some Ryuk/Rem_

**Obsession**

Is it possible to love when your existence centres around death?

Certainly it is difficult to love in the dank and dusty world of the shinigami, where friendships, happiness, despair; everything is decided by the fall of the dice, and anyone who does show affection for another is quickly destroyed. Even if he had known her while he was there, he doubts that he could have loved her. His life there meant nothing, and the landscape was monotonously, heavily grey.

Perhaps, then, it is the influence of the world he finds himself in. Here, there is laughter, tears, war, fear, and apples the colour of blood. And there is love here, too. It fills the air around Misa Amane like a thick, sweet perfume, oozing out and clinging to everything. It pours from Touta Matsuda in heavy waves, innocent and directionless. And it is in him too, lurking in the sharp tender pain high up in his stomach, opening up screaming and raw whenever he probes it, or when he sees the pale slender form of the one who has caused this.

She is like a skeleton, the bare frame on which his strange hopes and impossible desires have been hung. She seems made of bones, and yet she loves too. She is smooth, despite the jagged edges of her body. She is graceful, elegant, calm. She has taught him beauty; he can see it in the colour of her eyes. She has shown him himself, because when he thinks of her he can see his own shape, like crows' feathers and the scrawny limbs of the starved, as it must appear to her. She makes him feel ashamed and exhilarated all at once, and the combination of emotions, both so new and so fresh to his stunted mind, is enough to make him feel as if his entire world has been picked up and shaken hard with him still inside it.

He continues on regardless, as he does through everything, with a cackle and a leer.

Things change. Light becomes harder, more brittle. Misa is caught, and soon afterwards Rem vanishes too, with his book this time. And then everyone is divided, cordoned off into cells of steel, or the still stronger bounds that the black notebook uses to hold shinigami captive. His world blurs, runs down the steep plains of his mind into pain and convulsions under the unseeing lenses of cameras. Deprived of apples, of her, of any sort of stimulus that would normally keep him balanced on the edge, he wrestles with himself there until he is, suddenly, freed.

He goes back to the shinigami world, after Light gives up the book, and is at first stunned by the desolation, the peculiar smell of the hair and bones of the death gods, everything he has forgotten. He does not dwell on it for long, however, as he spends his first few hours back there cramming himself with the bitterly unsatisfying apples of that realm. Vaguely, through the clearing fog of his withdrawal, he thinks that Rem is probably here too, as the Kira killings have still not resumed and her 82 hours in the human world have run out. He takes another of the shrivelled fruits, and gets up.

He finds her crouched over the shattered eggshell spheres that serve as windows into that other world, her head tilted close and her long limbs folded, like the only other inhabitant of the shinigami realm that ever loved- the one who was destroyed by it. Rem herself had told him of it, one night while both Light and Misa slept.

An uncommon fear creeps over him; he laughs to shake it off, and she shifts without turning, a silent acknowledgement. She is searching the human world at random. Faces flash by almost too fast to recognise as she watches steadily, single visible eye direct. Yet he sees, in one corner of the hole she is gazing into, a metal chair, leather straps, a white dress of rags, and a blonde girl. He remembers the patchwork shinigami, how he had dissolved into sand as Rem watched, and he realises uneasily that although he recalls the shinigami, his obsession and his isolation, from before everything began, he never knew his name.

He feels sick. He longs for the juicy crunch of a human-world apple, and automatically raises the shrivelled substitute he holds to his face.

Sitting before him, Rem sighs, and he stops, seeing again the dozens of faces passing by all at once, and that one constant image, unchanging at the side.

He drops the apple into the dust. It rolls down over a small slope and she catches it, recognises its shape, turns that one eye up to him.

He shakes his head, feels foolish, cannot explain his presence. He thinks of Misa in the chair, seeing her even as he stares at Rem. He thinks of humans and their brief flickers of romance and dedication. He thinks of that other shinigami becoming dust and bones, blowing in the wind, becoming the landscape. And he thinks of Rem, still regarding him curiously as she holds up the apple.

He bends, hesitates, and takes her hand, closing her fingers around the fruit. He sees by her face that he has done the right thing.

* * *

_Author's notes: I wrote this for my friend Southpaw, who likes this pairing. It's not my sort of thing, but I still think this came out all right. Please review if you can._


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